In 1962, nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw was already drawing to a close. Although nobody knew it at the time, in just two years the unpredictable General Secretary would be forced into retirement by his fellow Politburo members – the first non-murderous deposition of a Russian leader in over a millennium of history.

These were strange times. Gone was the initial euphoria that swept over the intelligentsia after Khrushchev unexpectedly exposed Stalin’s Cult of Personality at the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956. Yet overall, the Thaw seemed to be continuing. Political prisoners were returning from the Gulag. In October 1961, after Stalin was further condemned at the 22nd Congress, his body was removed from the Mausoleum on Red Square, signaling that the “vozhd of all peoples” had been deemed unworthy of reposing alongside Lenin.* The literary journal Novy Mir had published Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The naïve generation that has been labeled the “Children of the 20th Congress” was busy producing optimistic films, writing daringly liberal books, and strumming their guitars to the tunes of romantic songs. The assumption was that the air had been cleared and from here on out things would only get better.

However, in the seven years that had passed since Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the 20th Con­gress, the powers that be had repeatedly shown they were not averse to flexing their totalitarian muscle. They had rallied the indignation of “the entire Soviet people” over the publication abroad (and subsequent Nobel Prize for author Boris Pasternak) of Doctor Zhivago (the standard phrase was, “I haven’t read Pasternak, but I can say that…”). The 1956 Hungarian uprising had been crushed by Soviet tanks. Protesting workers in Novocherkassk had been shot. And in October 1962, when Soviet missiles were sent to Cuba, humanity experienced a close brush with World War III.

In retrospect, it seems like it should have been obvious that the Thaw was probably not the prelude to a warm and glorious spring and that many a hard frost lay ahead. The Soviet intelligentsia, which apparently did not see the writing on the wall, continued to hope: they made their films, wrote their books, and staged their plays.

Artists, who had finally been allowed to see early twentieth-century art at a Picasso exhibition and modern art in general, a privilege they had heretofore been denied, were particularly energized by the Thaw and began seeking new approaches, new forms.

That was a mistake.

It turns out that it was one thing to condemn the Cult of Personality, but quite another to understand and accept avant-gardism. For Khrushchev and Co., it was easier to negotiate treaties with America than to fathom abstract art. At least President Kennedy spoke a language that interpreters could translate. Who was going to be able to explain this incomprehensible “smearing” to the Politburo?

Khrushchev’s December 1962 visit to the Manège Gallery exhibition, being held in conjunction with the thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow affiliate of the Artists Union, was a well-planned and premeditated provocation. And the targets were not limited to the young artists from Ely Bielutin’s studio, its immediate victims.

Bielutin’s group had not been among those initially invited to take part in the exhibition. Their work was considered too bizarre. However, on the eve of Khrushchev’s December 1 visit to the exhibition, they received a phone call from “the top,” telling them they could participate. They gladly worked through the night to transport and set up their paintings, not suspecting what lay in store for them. Khrushchev, already in an overwrought state after the events of the previous months – the Novocherkassk shootings in June and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October – was eager to pounce on any perceived threat to his authority. Furthermore, there were voices in the Kremlin telling him that such a threat could be found most notably in artists, who had no appreciation of what he was trying to achieve.

Not long before his visit to the exhibition, Khrushchev was informed that a group of homosexuals had been “uncovered” at the Iskusstvo (Art) publishing house. For Khrushchev, it was hard to imagine a worse “crime.” And then, at the exhibition, art experts who knew exactly what they were doing gave Nikita Sergeyevich a guided tour so as to highlight the works they knew would particularly rile him. What followed was his now famous insults hurled at artists who would later become the pride of the Russian art world: “Homos!” “Scum!” “Shit!” (Khrushchev was never restrained in his choice of words). Everyone involved in this mad farce can remember how mortified they were. There may have been a Thaw going on, but no one doubted that they could be sent to prison at any moment, or perhaps even shot. No wonder Ernst Neizvestny was so upset he cried out, “Does anyone have a pistol? Give it to me. I’ll shoot myself.”

Fortunately, none of the artists were arrested. They were simply ostracized, prohibited from showing their work, and deprived of their livelihoods. In a series of scathing speeches, Khrushchev castigated the entire creative intelligentsia, regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with avant-gardism. The screws were being tightened. While Khrushchev’s Thaw formally ended with his ouster in 1964, there is no doubt that in the cultural arena it came to an end on December 1, 1962.

After Khrushchev was forced into retirement, he often expressed regret over his crude browbeating of the young artists. The “Victims of Manège” were invited to visit the deposed leader, and after his death his family commissioned a tomb from that same Ernst Neizvestny whom Khrushchev had dragged through the mud.

Now, a half-century later, the debacle at the Manège Gallery does not seem so terrible and even serves as fodder for jokes, such as the alternative history of the event found on Uncyclopedia (Absurdopedia in Russian), the satirical answer to Wikipedia (see box, right).

Given the famously circular nature of Russian history, it is hard to hear about the latest group of “Orthodox activists” raiding an exhibition that strikes them as sacrilegious without wondering: have we really come so far since December 1, 1962?

* Vozhd – leader, chief (i.e. of a tribe)

Khrushchev at the Exhibition of Avant-Garde Artists

In 1962, when Khrushchev thought that he was visiting an exhibition of avant-garde artists at the Manège, he had actually been taken to the Tretyakov Gallery as part of a prank being played by Brezhnev and Suslov. At the Tretyakov, Khrushchev called the tour guides “homos” and caused catastrophic damage to the museum’s collection.

Khrushchev had been itching to show “those homos” – his affectionate nickname for modern artists – “what’s what,” which he felt would have a positive impact on their art. To that end, a resolution was passed in the Politburo that Khrushchev would pay a visit to the Manège Gallery’s avant-garde art exhibition and give the artists a dressing down, designed to bring them back into the socialist realist fold.

Unbeknownst to Khrushchev, however, Brezhnev and Suslov were plotting his downfall. At a secret meeting held in the men’s room of the Yaroslavl Station, Brezhnev and Suslov conspired to take Khrushchev not to the Manège, but to the Tretyakov Gallery, where he would compromise himself, allowing them to remove him for impetuous behavior.

On the appointed day, Khrushchev’s motorcade arrived at the Tretyakov. He was first taken to see early twentieth-century abstract art, where he fell into a rage and screamed “You homos!” before smashing Malevich’s Black Square over the head of a tour guide named Petrov.

Khrushchev was no calmer when he entered the room containing works by Shishkin, where he jested that “they couldn’t come up with anything better than copying some candy wrappers.” Shishkin’s Morning in a Pine Forest suffered serious damage.*

Outside the gallery where The Appearance of Christ before the People hung, Khrushchev’s path was blocked by an elderly visitor named Nikolayev. He threw himself at Khrushchev’s feet and pleaded, “Not here, anywhere but here.” Khrushchev took a look inside, and with the words, “Well, I guess that’s not too bad,” set out for the foreign art section.

As fate would have it, a collection of works by Leonardo da Vinci donated to the Soviet Union by Armand Hammer, the well-known collector of stolen art, was on exhibit that day. Khrushchev tore several of Leonardo’s works to shreds before turning his attention to The Last Supper, all the while muttering, “You call that art?” It was at this very moment that something extraordinary happened that secured this rather unremarkable event a place in the annals of history: an ironic smirk appeared on the face of the woman portrayed in The Mona Lisa. It remains there to this day.

For good measure, Khrushchev smashed a couple of naked statues before leaving to have lunch with Brezhnev and Suslov, who were smiling ear to ear.

Meanwhile, At the Manège

While all this was going on, nervous avant-garde artists were awaiting Khrushchev’s arrival at the Manège. Instead of abstract paintings (they were not stupid, after all), they were exhibiting, among other works, Stakhanov Pounds Out the Last Chunk of Coal; Corn, the Mother of the Fields; Communism on the Horizon, as well as several statues of the girl with the oar.

When it became clear that Khrushchev was not going to show up, Ernst Neizvestny invited everyone to his place to drink vodka and kick around Lenin’s corpse.

* This nineteenth century classic has long been featured on the wrapper of a popular chocolate candy, «Мишка косолапый» (Clumsy Bear).